La Luz
La Luz is the antagonist power. Officially the Illuminated Empire. Functionally a rising techno-fascist state that is, right now, on the offensive everywhere — reclaiming colonies through the Reunión, exporting its culture into every black market on the planet, and quietly running the Weeping Eye against the Operant Bureau wherever the two intersect.
La Luz is one of the three great powers in the game’s world. The other two are the communist Superbloc (Hershel’s home team) and EMTERR, the global investment bank. Of the three, La Luz is the one whose ascent everyone — including the writing — keeps marking as the defining trend of the moment.
The short version
If the Superbloc is the tired old grandparent and EMTERR is the bank that owns the building, La Luz is the new neighbour who just bought half the street and is renaming it. It’s annexing former colonies. It’s killing civilians with weapons called berrion bombs. And the Bazaar in Quisach is full of bootleg La Luz cartoons (see Sixty-Six Wolves) because Luzian culture is, in ‘96, what everyone wants.
The Reunión
La Luz centuries ago was a powerful empire. It declined and ceded independence to colonies including Portofiro, Havagerly, and the Tenantries of Saint Ulwen. In recent decades it reversed that decline and is now reclaiming everything it lost.
The Reunión is the name for that campaign. The official line is that it’s a legal process. The actual practice involves:
- overwhelming military force;
- berrion bombs (weapons of mass destruction);
- heavy civilian casualties;
- mass displacement.
Recent Reunión results:
- Havagerly — re-annexed, with the border to Tsun’s Arc closed off.
- The Territories, a chain of island states in the Noscorrentes Sea (including the Tenantries of Saint Ulwen) — re-annexed.
- Portofiro — not annexed, but functionally inside La Luz’s cultural and criminal sphere, which is partly why the Weeping Eye is moving freely there.
Overview[]
La Luz is one of the three main powers of the world, the others being the communist Superbloc and the global investment bank EMTERR.
Centuries ago, La Luz grew into a powerful empire before declining and ceding independence to colonies and territories such as Portofiro, Havagerly, and the Tenantries of Saint Ulwen. In recent decades, La Luz has managed to reverse its decline and reassert itself as a burgeoning auto-technocratic state considered the rising cultural and military power of the day.
Currently, La Luz is engaged in the Reunión, a gradual, long-term campaign to reclaim all of its old colonies. The Reunión is described as legal, but La Luz frequently employs overwhelming military force, including weapons of mass destruction called berrion bombs, to subjugate its targets, resulting in a heavy civilian death toll and refugee displacement. La Luz recently re-annexed Havagerly and closed Havagerly’s border with Tsun’s Arc. It also re-annexed the Territories, a series of island states in the Noscorrentes Sea that included the Tenantries of Saint Ulwen.
Overview[]
La Luz is one of the three main powers of the world, the others being the communist Superbloc and the global investment bank EMTERR.
Centuries ago, La Luz grew into a powerful empire before declining and ceding independence to colonies and territories such as Portofiro, Havagerly, and the Tenantries of Saint Ulwen. In recent decades, La Luz has managed to reverse its decline and reassert itself as a burgeoning auto-technocratic state considered the rising cultural and military power of the day.
Currently, La Luz is engaged in the Reunión, a gradual, long-term campaign to reclaim all of its old colonies. The Reunión is described as legal, but La Luz frequently employs overwhelming military force, including weapons of mass destruction called berrion bombs, to subjugate its targets, resulting in a heavy civilian death toll and refugee displacement. La Luz recently re-annexed Havagerly and closed Havagerly’s border with Tsun’s Arc. It also re-annexed the Territories, a series of island states in the Noscorrentes Sea that included the Tenantries of Saint Ulwen.
The Ministry of Mass Culture is responsible for exporting Luzian products, such as Ouroboros Black cigarettes, to other countries. One of the most popular Luzian cultural exports is the cartoon television show Sixty-Six Wolves . Recordings and merchandise related to the show are known to sell quickly on black markets, such as the Bootleg Bazaar in Portofiro’s Quisach district. La Luz is also the progenitor of a genre of music called L-Pop, which is officially sanctioned by the state and rumored to be able to infiltrate a person’s subconscious. The latest trending L-Pop star is Ultra Violeta.
La Luz remains under an “EMTERR Cultural Blockade” that prohibits the exportation of Luzian pop culture to the rest of the Developed World, which consists of advanced capitalist countries that EMTERR considers its domain. This has not stopped Portofiro from becoming a major distribution hub for bootleg Luzian cultural goods that have been converted to international formats.
Conspiracy theories insinuate that the Luzian ruling class consists entirely of gradually degrading copies of the consciousness of a single person, the ideological founder of techno-fascism.
The language of La Luz, Luzian, is also shared by its former colony Portofiro.
La Luz has a secret police force called the Weeping Eye, another of the enemies of the Operant Bureau.
Cities[]
- Acuerda
- Cicatriz Frontera — capital city
Why La Luz matters to the player
The game does not let La Luz be subtle. You’ll feel it through:
- The Weeping Eye’s signatures — the cocaine emblem on Tempo’s desk, surveillance you can detect with Sensors, the burned-cell history of the Whole Sick Crew.
- The cultural flood — Sixty-Six Wolves merchandise (the Wolf Cups), Ouroboros Black cigarettes, L-Pop tracks playing in shops, the Luzian language itself being shared with Portofiro.
- The Luzian customer wave at the Bootleg Bazaar — under Tempo del Sur’s rule, Luzian buyers were coming to Quisach in numbers the local gangs hated, which is part of the pressure that built up to his murder.
A pragmatic read: La Luz is not currently invading Portofiro with troops. It’s doing it with cigarettes, cartoons, music that allegedly rewires your subconscious, and a secret police operation that selectively assassinates the wrong asset.
That’s the ground you’re working on.
What’s confirmed vs. unknown
Confirmed: La Luz is officially the Illuminated Empire, one of three world powers, formerly an empire that decolonised and is now re-imperialising via the Reunión, deploys berrion bombs, runs the Weeping Eye, exports Luzian culture aggressively, shares the Luzian language with its former colony Portofiro, and is rumoured to be ruled by gradually degrading copies of one founder’s consciousness.
Unknown to the player at game start: how far the Reunión actually extends, what L-Pop’s “infiltrate the subconscious” claim is literally referring to, whether the conspiracy theory about the ruling class’s clone-consciousness is true, and how much of the ‘96 Weeping Eye crackdown on Portofiro is directly ordered from Cicatriz Frontera versus carried out by local actors with broad authorisation.